1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile communications system, a base station, a mobile station, a threshold setting method therefor, and a storage medium having program of the method recorded therein, and more specifically to a method for setting a threshold for use in switching modulation-coding modes in a system in which an HS-PDSCH (High Speed-Physical Downlink Shared Channel) is used.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, in a mobile terminal (mobile station) such as a portable telephone unit or the like, multimedia technology has been introduced to process still pictures having a large volume of data, short-time moving pictures, etc., and a large capacity and high speed data transmission method is required correspondingly.
As the large capacity and high speed data transmission method, a PDSCH (Physical Downlink Shared Channel) system and an HS-PDSCH system, etc. in which only a downlink (from a base station to a mobile station) transmission rate is increased have been suggested.
In a mobile communications system for transmitting data from a base station to a mobile station using the above mentioned HS-PDSCH, any of a plurality of modulation-coding modes can be selected. Each of the modulation-coding modes is a combination of any of a plurality of modulation modes such as the QPSK (Quadrature Phase Shift Keying) for transmitting two bits (four values) in one modulating process, the 16QAM (16 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) for transmitting four bits (sixteen values) in one modulating process, the 64QAM (64 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) for transmitting six bits (sixty-four values) in one modulating process, etc. and any of a plurality of coding modes such as the ¾ rate error correction code having the redundancy of the ratio of 4/3 of a total number of bits to information bits with a check bit added, the ½ rate error correction code having the redundancy of the ratio of 2/1 of a total number of bits to information bits, etc.
A method for selecting any of the above mentioned modulation-coding modes can be a conventional method of selecting a modulation-coding mode depending on the reception quality of a common pilot signal after determining as a prefixed threshold the range of the reception quality [Ec/Io (energy per chip/interference wave power per unit frequency)] of the common pilot signal of a CPICH (Common Pilot Channel) which is transmitted from a base station to a mobile station.
In this case, the mobile station notifies the base station of a measurement result of the reception quality of the common pilot signal from the base station. The base station compares the reception quality of the common pilot signal obtained from the mobile station with the threshold, thereby selecting a modulation-coding mode depending on the reception quality.
Another method for selecting any of the modulation-coding modes can be a method of selecting a modulation-coding mode corresponding to the transmission power of an individual signal by determining as a prefixed threshold the range of the transmission power of the individual signal of a DPCH (Dedicated Physical Channel) of the downlink from the base station to the mobile station. In this case, the high-speed closed loop transmission power control is performed such that predetermined reception quality can be obtained in the mobile station for the downlink individual signal.
The TR (Technical Report) 25.848 V4.0.0 (March in 2001) of the 3GPP (third generation partnership project) describes the modulation-coding mode as the AMC (Adaptive Modulation and Coding). Prefixed values are set through simulation for the range of the reception quality of the common pilot signal, and the range of the transmission power of the individual signal.
In the above mentioned conventional mobile communications system, there is the problem that it is difficult to set the optimum range (threshold) of the reception quality of a common pilot signal corresponding to each modulation-coding mode when a modulation-coding mode is selected depending on the reception quality of a common pilot signal.
Although the same reception quality of a common pilot signal is set, the performance of a terminal can be different. Therefore, the reception error rate of a packet can also be different. As a result, there is also the problem that each terminal has a different optimum value for the threshold of the reception quality of a common pilot signal corresponding to each modulation-coding mode of each terminal.
The factor of determining the link condition can be a propagation loss, a multi-path environment (the number of paths and the size of each path), noise power (interference wave power and heat noise power), the moving speed of a mobile station, etc. Therefore, although the same reception quality of a common pilot signal is set, there can be any of the above mentioned different factors. As a result, a different optimum mode can be set for the HS-PDSCH depending on the multi-path environment and the moving speed of a mobile station. The optimum mode refers to the mode having the highest data transmission rate in the modes satisfying the target communications quality (block error rate, etc.).
On the other hand, in the case of the method of selecting a modulation-coding mode corresponding to the transmission power of an individual signal, there is no feedback delay due to the report of the reception quality of the above mentioned common pilot signal from a mobile station to a base station. Therefore, there is no influence of a feedback delay.
However, there is also the problem in this method that it is difficult to set the optimum range (threshold) of the transmission power of the individual signal corresponding to each modulation-coding mode. Furthermore, in this method, if a mobile station is located at the cell boundary, and soft handover is performed to set the dedicated physical channel for a plurality of base stations, then there can be a larger error from the actual downlink link quality on the assumption of the downlink link quality with the transmission power of the individual signal because no soft handover is performed in the data transmission using the above mentioned HS-PDSCH, but data is transmitted from one base station only.